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America in Decline: Why Germans Think We're Insane
By Democrats Ramshield, AlterNet Posted on December 26, 2010, Printed on December 29, 2010 http://www.alternet.org/story/149324/ As an American expat living in the European Union, I’ve started to see America from a different perspective. The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less -- right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical -- the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population. The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane. Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called "A Superpower in Decline," which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at "balance" found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties: Full of Hatred: "The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn't quite know what he wants to be -- maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher -- and he doesn't know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn't come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred." The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America’s actual unemployment rate isn’t really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work. Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn't it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.) Jobless Benefits That Never Run Out Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that -- as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families. In the German jobless benefit system, when "jobless benefit 1" runs out, "jobless benefit 2," also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust. In another piece the Spiegel magazine steps away from statistics and tells the story of Pam Brown, who personifies what is coming to be known as the Nouveau American poor. Pam Brown was a former executive assistant on Wall Street, and her shocking decline has become part of the American story: American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Among them, for the first time, are many middle-class families. Meet Pam Brown from New York, whose life changed overnight. The crisis caught her unprepared. "It was horrible," Pam Brown remembers. "Overnight I found myself on the wrong side of the fence. It never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. I got very depressed." Brown sits in a cheap diner on West 14th Street in Manhattan, stirring her $1.35 coffee. That's all she orders -- it's too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. She also needs to save money. Until early 2009, Brown worked as an executive assistant on Wall Street, earning more than $80,000 a year, living in a six-bedroom house with her three sons. Today, she's long-term unemployed and has to make do with a tiny one-bedroom in the Bronx. It's important to note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps in order to humiliate its disadvantaged citizens in the grocery checkout line. Even worse is the fact that even the humbling food stamp allotment may not provide enough food for America’s jobless families. So it is on a reoccurring basis that some of these families report eating out of garbage cans to the European media. For Pam Brown, last winter was the worst. One day she ran out of food completely and had to go through trash cans. She fell into a deep depression ... For many, like Brown, the downfall is a Kafkaesque odyssey, a humiliation hard to comprehend. Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them. Pam Brown and her children were disturbingly, indeed incomprehensibly, allowed to fall straight to the bottom. The richest country in the world becomes morally bankrupt when someone like Pam Brown and her children have to pick through trash to eat, abandoned with a callous disregard by the American government. People like Brown have found themselves dispossessed due to the robber baron actions of the Wall Street elite. Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac A shocking headline from a Swiss newspaper reads (Berner Zeitung) “Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac.” Though the article is in German, the pictures are worth 1,000 words and need no translation. Given the fact that the Swiss virtually eliminated hunger, how do we as Americans think they will view these pictures, to which the American population has apparently been desensitized. Perhaps the only way for us to remember what we really look like in America is to see ourselves through the eyes of others. While it is true that we can all be proud Americans, surely we don't have to be proud of the broken American social safety net. Surely we can do better than that. Can a European-style social safety net rescue the American working and middle classes from GOP and Tea Party warfare? http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/149324 |
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The Germans are stupid for letting terrorist Muslims take over their country.
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The Germans are stupid for letting terrorist Muslims take over their country. |
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America in Decline: Why Germans Think We're Insane By Democrats Ramshield, AlterNet Posted on December 26, 2010, Printed on December 29, 2010 http://www.alternet.org/story/149324/ As an American expat living in the European Union, I’ve started to see America from a different perspective. The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less -- right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical -- the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population. The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane. Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called "A Superpower in Decline," which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at "balance" found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties: Full of Hatred: "The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn't quite know what he wants to be -- maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher -- and he doesn't know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn't come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred." The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America’s actual unemployment rate isn’t really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work. Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn't it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.) Jobless Benefits That Never Run Out Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that -- as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families. In the German jobless benefit system, when "jobless benefit 1" runs out, "jobless benefit 2," also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust. In another piece the Spiegel magazine steps away from statistics and tells the story of Pam Brown, who personifies what is coming to be known as the Nouveau American poor. Pam Brown was a former executive assistant on Wall Street, and her shocking decline has become part of the American story: American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Among them, for the first time, are many middle-class families. Meet Pam Brown from New York, whose life changed overnight. The crisis caught her unprepared. "It was horrible," Pam Brown remembers. "Overnight I found myself on the wrong side of the fence. It never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. I got very depressed." Brown sits in a cheap diner on West 14th Street in Manhattan, stirring her $1.35 coffee. That's all she orders -- it's too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. She also needs to save money. Until early 2009, Brown worked as an executive assistant on Wall Street, earning more than $80,000 a year, living in a six-bedroom house with her three sons. Today, she's long-term unemployed and has to make do with a tiny one-bedroom in the Bronx. It's important to note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps in order to humiliate its disadvantaged citizens in the grocery checkout line. Even worse is the fact that even the humbling food stamp allotment may not provide enough food for America’s jobless families. So it is on a reoccurring basis that some of these families report eating out of garbage cans to the European media. For Pam Brown, last winter was the worst. One day she ran out of food completely and had to go through trash cans. She fell into a deep depression ... For many, like Brown, the downfall is a Kafkaesque odyssey, a humiliation hard to comprehend. Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them. Pam Brown and her children were disturbingly, indeed incomprehensibly, allowed to fall straight to the bottom. The richest country in the world becomes morally bankrupt when someone like Pam Brown and her children have to pick through trash to eat, abandoned with a callous disregard by the American government. People like Brown have found themselves dispossessed due to the robber baron actions of the Wall Street elite. Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac A shocking headline from a Swiss newspaper reads (Berner Zeitung) “Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac.” Though the article is in German, the pictures are worth 1,000 words and need no translation. Given the fact that the Swiss virtually eliminated hunger, how do we as Americans think they will view these pictures, to which the American population has apparently been desensitized. Perhaps the only way for us to remember what we really look like in America is to see ourselves through the eyes of others. While it is true that we can all be proud Americans, surely we don't have to be proud of the broken American social safety net. Surely we can do better than that. Can a European-style social safety net rescue the American working and middle classes from GOP and Tea Party warfare? http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/149324 its no secret that america slid downhill since obama took over, but we all still have to live here anyways...2 more years and ole big ears will be gone... just have to tread water till then |
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America in Decline: Why Germans Think We're Insane By Democrats Ramshield, AlterNet Posted on December 26, 2010, Printed on December 29, 2010 http://www.alternet.org/story/149324/ As an American expat living in the European Union, I’ve started to see America from a different perspective. The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less -- right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical -- the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population. The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane. Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called "A Superpower in Decline," which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at "balance" found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties: Full of Hatred: "The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn't quite know what he wants to be -- maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher -- and he doesn't know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn't come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred." The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America’s actual unemployment rate isn’t really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work. Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn't it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.) Jobless Benefits That Never Run Out Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that -- as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families. In the German jobless benefit system, when "jobless benefit 1" runs out, "jobless benefit 2," also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust. In another piece the Spiegel magazine steps away from statistics and tells the story of Pam Brown, who personifies what is coming to be known as the Nouveau American poor. Pam Brown was a former executive assistant on Wall Street, and her shocking decline has become part of the American story: American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Among them, for the first time, are many middle-class families. Meet Pam Brown from New York, whose life changed overnight. The crisis caught her unprepared. "It was horrible," Pam Brown remembers. "Overnight I found myself on the wrong side of the fence. It never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. I got very depressed." Brown sits in a cheap diner on West 14th Street in Manhattan, stirring her $1.35 coffee. That's all she orders -- it's too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. She also needs to save money. Until early 2009, Brown worked as an executive assistant on Wall Street, earning more than $80,000 a year, living in a six-bedroom house with her three sons. Today, she's long-term unemployed and has to make do with a tiny one-bedroom in the Bronx. It's important to note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps in order to humiliate its disadvantaged citizens in the grocery checkout line. Even worse is the fact that even the humbling food stamp allotment may not provide enough food for America’s jobless families. So it is on a reoccurring basis that some of these families report eating out of garbage cans to the European media. For Pam Brown, last winter was the worst. One day she ran out of food completely and had to go through trash cans. She fell into a deep depression ... For many, like Brown, the downfall is a Kafkaesque odyssey, a humiliation hard to comprehend. Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them. Pam Brown and her children were disturbingly, indeed incomprehensibly, allowed to fall straight to the bottom. The richest country in the world becomes morally bankrupt when someone like Pam Brown and her children have to pick through trash to eat, abandoned with a callous disregard by the American government. People like Brown have found themselves dispossessed due to the robber baron actions of the Wall Street elite. Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac A shocking headline from a Swiss newspaper reads (Berner Zeitung) “Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac.” Though the article is in German, the pictures are worth 1,000 words and need no translation. Given the fact that the Swiss virtually eliminated hunger, how do we as Americans think they will view these pictures, to which the American population has apparently been desensitized. Perhaps the only way for us to remember what we really look like in America is to see ourselves through the eyes of others. While it is true that we can all be proud Americans, surely we don't have to be proud of the broken American social safety net. Surely we can do better than that. Can a European-style social safety net rescue the American working and middle classes from GOP and Tea Party warfare? http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/149324 its no secret that america slid downhill since obama took over, but we all still have to live here anyways...2 more years and ole big ears will be gone... just have to tread water till then |
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Darn Republicans!
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Edited by
heavenlyboy34
on
Wed 12/29/10 06:17 PM
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The OP is a bunch of wishful thinking. They may have these benefits for now, but in reality, the whole of Germany is bankrupt, thanks in part to their health care "freebies". Germany and the other EU members have been laughing stocks to economists for a long time now.
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This article confirms what I've believed for years now. The United States IS morally banktupt, a modern Roman Empire on the brink of self-destruction. A country that advocates reducing the income of the aged and poor while increasing that of the obscenely weathy doesn't deserve the support of its citizens.
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Edited by
Bestinshow
on
Wed 12/29/10 07:00 PM
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The OP is a bunch of wishful thinking. They may have these benefits for now, but in reality, the whole of Germany is bankrupt, thanks in part to their health care "freebies". Germany and the other EU members have been laughing stocks to economists for a long time now. Ok reality check Germany and most of western Europe have universal healtch care cradle to grave, America has never had that yet we are collapsing and you make fun of the Germans, Please face the grim reality and be part of the solution not the problemb. |
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Edited by
Bestinshow
on
Wed 12/29/10 06:59 PM
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This article confirms what I've believed for years now. The United States IS morally banktupt, a modern Roman Empire on the brink of self-destruction. A country that advocates reducing the income of the aged and poor while increasing that of the obscenely weathy doesn't deserve the support of its citizens. |
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America in Decline: Why Germans Think We're Insane By Democrats Ramshield, AlterNet Posted on December 26, 2010, Printed on December 29, 2010 http://www.alternet.org/story/149324/ As an American expat living in the European Union, I’ve started to see America from a different perspective. The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less -- right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical -- the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population. The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane. Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called "A Superpower in Decline," which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at "balance" found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties: Full of Hatred: "The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn't quite know what he wants to be -- maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher -- and he doesn't know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn't come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred." The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America’s actual unemployment rate isn’t really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work. Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn't it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.) Jobless Benefits That Never Run Out Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that -- as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families. In the German jobless benefit system, when "jobless benefit 1" runs out, "jobless benefit 2," also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust. In another piece the Spiegel magazine steps away from statistics and tells the story of Pam Brown, who personifies what is coming to be known as the Nouveau American poor. Pam Brown was a former executive assistant on Wall Street, and her shocking decline has become part of the American story: American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Among them, for the first time, are many middle-class families. Meet Pam Brown from New York, whose life changed overnight. The crisis caught her unprepared. "It was horrible," Pam Brown remembers. "Overnight I found myself on the wrong side of the fence. It never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. I got very depressed." Brown sits in a cheap diner on West 14th Street in Manhattan, stirring her $1.35 coffee. That's all she orders -- it's too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. She also needs to save money. Until early 2009, Brown worked as an executive assistant on Wall Street, earning more than $80,000 a year, living in a six-bedroom house with her three sons. Today, she's long-term unemployed and has to make do with a tiny one-bedroom in the Bronx. It's important to note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps in order to humiliate its disadvantaged citizens in the grocery checkout line. Even worse is the fact that even the humbling food stamp allotment may not provide enough food for America’s jobless families. So it is on a reoccurring basis that some of these families report eating out of garbage cans to the European media. For Pam Brown, last winter was the worst. One day she ran out of food completely and had to go through trash cans. She fell into a deep depression ... For many, like Brown, the downfall is a Kafkaesque odyssey, a humiliation hard to comprehend. Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them. Pam Brown and her children were disturbingly, indeed incomprehensibly, allowed to fall straight to the bottom. The richest country in the world becomes morally bankrupt when someone like Pam Brown and her children have to pick through trash to eat, abandoned with a callous disregard by the American government. People like Brown have found themselves dispossessed due to the robber baron actions of the Wall Street elite. Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac A shocking headline from a Swiss newspaper reads (Berner Zeitung) “Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac.” Though the article is in German, the pictures are worth 1,000 words and need no translation. Given the fact that the Swiss virtually eliminated hunger, how do we as Americans think they will view these pictures, to which the American population has apparently been desensitized. Perhaps the only way for us to remember what we really look like in America is to see ourselves through the eyes of others. While it is true that we can all be proud Americans, surely we don't have to be proud of the broken American social safety net. Surely we can do better than that. Can a European-style social safety net rescue the American working and middle classes from GOP and Tea Party warfare? http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/149324 Just another useless article that would be good for toilet paper if I read it in the newspaper.As usual with the majority of the articles you post in here which are mostly commentary,they rarely are factual and are easily shot down with little reasearch. Yes there is unemployed people at around 15 million.But 154 million are still employed.That's a pretty good number considering we are in one of the worst recessions in recent history. The United states has the greatest and most powerful economy in the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States The economy of the United States is the world's largest national economy. Its nominal GDP was estimated to be $14.3 trillion in 2009, approximately a quarter of nominal global GDP.[1][11] Its GDP at purchasing power parity was also the largest in the world, approximately a fifth of global GDP at purchasing power parity.[1] The U.S. economy also maintains a very high level of output per capita. In 2009, it was estimated to have a per capita GDP (PPP) of $46,381, the 6th highest in the world. Historically, the U.S. economy has maintained a stable overall GDP growth rate, a low unemployment rate, and high levels of research and capital investment funded by both national and, because of decreasing saving rates, increasingly by foreign investors. It has been the world's largest national economy since 1944 and remains the world's largest manufacturer, representing 19% of the world's manufacturing output. In 2009, consumer spending, coupled with government health care spending constituted 70% of the American economy.[12] About 30% of the entire world's millionaire population reside in the United States (in 2009).[13] Furthermore, 40% of the world's billionaires are American.[14] The US is also home to the world's largest stock exchange, the New York Stock Exchange. It also boasts the world's largest gold reserves and the world's largest gold depository, the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The United States is also home to 139 of the world's 500 largest companies, which is almost twice that of any other country.[15] A large contributor to the country's success has also been a very strong and stable currency. The US dollar holds about 60% of world reserves, as compared to its top competitor, the euro, which controls about 24%. |
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This article confirms what I've believed for years now. The United States IS morally banktupt, a modern Roman Empire on the brink of self-destruction. A country that advocates reducing the income of the aged and poor while increasing that of the obscenely weathy doesn't deserve the support of its citizens. I have to wonder why you are using a child molesters van in your profile photo?I bet the women on this site with children love that one. 
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America in Decline: Why Germans Think We're Insane By Democrats Ramshield, AlterNet Posted on December 26, 2010, Printed on December 29, 2010 http://www.alternet.org/story/149324/ As an American expat living in the European Union, I’ve started to see America from a different perspective. The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less -- right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical -- the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population. The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane. Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called "A Superpower in Decline," which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at "balance" found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties: Full of Hatred: "The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn't quite know what he wants to be -- maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher -- and he doesn't know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn't come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred." The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America’s actual unemployment rate isn’t really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work. Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn't it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.) Jobless Benefits That Never Run Out Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that -- as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families. In the German jobless benefit system, when "jobless benefit 1" runs out, "jobless benefit 2," also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust. In another piece the Spiegel magazine steps away from statistics and tells the story of Pam Brown, who personifies what is coming to be known as the Nouveau American poor. Pam Brown was a former executive assistant on Wall Street, and her shocking decline has become part of the American story: American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Among them, for the first time, are many middle-class families. Meet Pam Brown from New York, whose life changed overnight. The crisis caught her unprepared. "It was horrible," Pam Brown remembers. "Overnight I found myself on the wrong side of the fence. It never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. I got very depressed." Brown sits in a cheap diner on West 14th Street in Manhattan, stirring her $1.35 coffee. That's all she orders -- it's too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. She also needs to save money. Until early 2009, Brown worked as an executive assistant on Wall Street, earning more than $80,000 a year, living in a six-bedroom house with her three sons. Today, she's long-term unemployed and has to make do with a tiny one-bedroom in the Bronx. It's important to note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps in order to humiliate its disadvantaged citizens in the grocery checkout line. Even worse is the fact that even the humbling food stamp allotment may not provide enough food for America’s jobless families. So it is on a reoccurring basis that some of these families report eating out of garbage cans to the European media. For Pam Brown, last winter was the worst. One day she ran out of food completely and had to go through trash cans. She fell into a deep depression ... For many, like Brown, the downfall is a Kafkaesque odyssey, a humiliation hard to comprehend. Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them. Pam Brown and her children were disturbingly, indeed incomprehensibly, allowed to fall straight to the bottom. The richest country in the world becomes morally bankrupt when someone like Pam Brown and her children have to pick through trash to eat, abandoned with a callous disregard by the American government. People like Brown have found themselves dispossessed due to the robber baron actions of the Wall Street elite. Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac A shocking headline from a Swiss newspaper reads (Berner Zeitung) “Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac.” Though the article is in German, the pictures are worth 1,000 words and need no translation. Given the fact that the Swiss virtually eliminated hunger, how do we as Americans think they will view these pictures, to which the American population has apparently been desensitized. Perhaps the only way for us to remember what we really look like in America is to see ourselves through the eyes of others. While it is true that we can all be proud Americans, surely we don't have to be proud of the broken American social safety net. Surely we can do better than that. Can a European-style social safety net rescue the American working and middle classes from GOP and Tea Party warfare? http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/149324 Just another useless article that would be good for toilet paper if I read it in the newspaper.As usual with the majority of the articles you post in here which are mostly commentary,they rarely are factual and are easily shot down with little reasearch. Yes there is unemployed people at around 15 million.But 154 million are still employed.That's a pretty good number considering we are in one of the worst recessions in recent history. The United states has the greatest and most powerful economy in the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States The economy of the United States is the world's largest national economy. Its nominal GDP was estimated to be $14.3 trillion in 2009, approximately a quarter of nominal global GDP.[1][11] Its GDP at purchasing power parity was also the largest in the world, approximately a fifth of global GDP at purchasing power parity.[1] The U.S. economy also maintains a very high level of output per capita. In 2009, it was estimated to have a per capita GDP (PPP) of $46,381, the 6th highest in the world. Historically, the U.S. economy has maintained a stable overall GDP growth rate, a low unemployment rate, and high levels of research and capital investment funded by both national and, because of decreasing saving rates, increasingly by foreign investors. It has been the world's largest national economy since 1944 and remains the world's largest manufacturer, representing 19% of the world's manufacturing output. In 2009, consumer spending, coupled with government health care spending constituted 70% of the American economy.[12] About 30% of the entire world's millionaire population reside in the United States (in 2009).[13] Furthermore, 40% of the world's billionaires are American.[14] The US is also home to the world's largest stock exchange, the New York Stock Exchange. It also boasts the world's largest gold reserves and the world's largest gold depository, the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The United States is also home to 139 of the world's 500 largest companies, which is almost twice that of any other country.[15] A large contributor to the country's success has also been a very strong and stable currency. The US dollar holds about 60% of world reserves, as compared to its top competitor, the euro, which controls about 24%. |
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This article confirms what I've believed for years now. The United States IS morally banktupt, a modern Roman Empire on the brink of self-destruction. A country that advocates reducing the income of the aged and poor while increasing that of the obscenely weathy doesn't deserve the support of its citizens. I have to wonder why you are using a child molesters van in your profile photo?I bet the women on this site with children love that one.
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This article confirms what I've believed for years now. The United States IS morally banktupt, a modern Roman Empire on the brink of self-destruction. A country that advocates reducing the income of the aged and poor while increasing that of the obscenely weathy doesn't deserve the support of its citizens. I have to wonder why you are using a child molesters van in your profile photo?I bet the women on this site with children love that one.
I guess I find that about as funny as a dead child along the highway because she was lured into a van on empty promises.If being a moron is laughing at someones dead child and exploiting and turning the tactics of child molesters into a joke to be laughed at on some singles site then I don't know what to tell you. |
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This article confirms what I've believed for years now. The United States IS morally banktupt, a modern Roman Empire on the brink of self-destruction. A country that advocates reducing the income of the aged and poor while increasing that of the obscenely weathy doesn't deserve the support of its citizens. I have to wonder why you are using a child molesters van in your profile photo?I bet the women on this site with children love that one.
I guess I find that about as funny as a dead child along the highway because she was lured into a van on empty promises.If being a moron is laughing at someones dead child and exploiting and turning the tactics of child molesters into a joke to be laughed at on some singles site then I don't know what to tell you. |
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The OP is a bunch of wishful thinking. They may have these benefits for now, but in reality, the whole of Germany is bankrupt, thanks in part to their health care "freebies". Germany and the other EU members have been laughing stocks to economists for a long time now. Ok reality check Germany and most of western Europe have universal healtch care cradle to grave, America has never had that yet we are collapsing and you make fun of the Germans, Please face the grim reality and be part of the solution not the problemb. Germany's national debt is more than 5 trillion dollars. The GDP is a bit over 3 trillion. That is not a good economic situation to be in. I'm not making fun of the Germans, I'm pointing out that your assessment is incorrect. The reasons the American economy is collapsing is manifold. Among the reasons are unfunded liabilities, unnecessary wars, Federal Reserve policy, and out of control spending at all levels. As to Germany(and the EU generally), it is you who is grossly uninformed. "'Germany cannot keep paying for bail-outs without going bankrupt itself,' said Professor Wilhelm Hankel, of Frankfurt University. 'This is frightening people. You cannot find a bank safe deposit box in Germany because every single one has already been taken and stuffed with gold and silver. It is like an underground Switzerland within our borders. People have terrible memories of 1948 and 1923 when they lost their savings.' The refrain was picked up this week by German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble. 'We're not swimming in money, we're drowning in debts,' he told the Bundestag." -UK Daily Telegraph "Adjusted for demographics, Germany is already one of the most indebted nations in the world." -UK Daily Telegraph |
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This article confirms what I've believed for years now. The United States IS morally banktupt, a modern Roman Empire on the brink of self-destruction. A country that advocates reducing the income of the aged and poor while increasing that of the obscenely weathy doesn't deserve the support of its citizens. I have to wonder why you are using a child molesters van in your profile photo?I bet the women on this site with children love that one.
I guess I find that about as funny as a dead child along the highway because she was lured into a van on empty promises.If being a moron is laughing at someones dead child and exploiting and turning the tactics of child molesters into a joke to be laughed at on some singles site then I don't know what to tell you. lol... that will make happy! |
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Edited by
Bestinshow
on
Wed 12/29/10 08:32 PM
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The OP is a bunch of wishful thinking. They may have these benefits for now, but in reality, the whole of Germany is bankrupt, thanks in part to their health care "freebies". Germany and the other EU members have been laughing stocks to economists for a long time now. Ok reality check Germany and most of western Europe have universal healtch care cradle to grave, America has never had that yet we are collapsing and you make fun of the Germans, Please face the grim reality and be part of the solution not the problemb. Germany's national debt is more than 5 trillion dollars. The GDP is a bit over 3 trillion. That is not a good economic situation to be in. I'm not making fun of the Germans, I'm pointing out that your assessment is incorrect. The reasons the American economy is collapsing is manifold. Among the reasons are unfunded liabilities, unnecessary wars, Federal Reserve policy, and out of control spending at all levels. As to Germany(and the EU generally), it is you who is grossly uninformed. "'Germany cannot keep paying for bail-outs without going bankrupt itself,' said Professor Wilhelm Hankel, of Frankfurt University. 'This is frightening people. You cannot find a bank safe deposit box in Germany because every single one has already been taken and stuffed with gold and silver. It is like an underground Switzerland within our borders. People have terrible memories of 1948 and 1923 when they lost their savings.' The refrain was picked up this week by German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble. 'We're not swimming in money, we're drowning in debts,' he told the Bundestag." -UK Daily Telegraph "Adjusted for demographics, Germany is already one of the most indebted nations in the world." -UK Daily Telegraph |
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We have numerous organizations and churches who take care of the poor and disadvantaged. Americans are among the highest donors to charities in the world. I am not a republican (or a democrat), but the reason that "services to the poor and aged" have to be cut is that they are unfunded mandates. Economic law tells us that what cannot go on will not go on. Unfunded programs must either provide progressively inferior service as debt builds, or taxation/inflation has to go up. Either way, it's a lose-lose situation for taxpayers and the "disadvantaged" alike. Further, these programs are top-heavy, highly inefficient beaurocracies. Their existence is entirely political-the politicians use them to buy votes. In summary, if you want to help people, get others to donate to the cause voluntarily. This is the only proven solution. |
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